IGF 2017 WS #91
Policy Challenges for AI Development

- Session Title:   Policy Challenges for AI Development             
- Date:  Dec 19, 2017                
- Time:  09:00—10:30               
- Session Organizer:  Internet Society of China             
- Chair/Moderator: Xiaoyan RAN             
- Rapporteur/Notetaker: Yexin LIU           

- List of Speakers and their institutional affiliations:     

1.Mr. Satish Babu, Chair of ICANN APRALO, Founding Director of the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software

2.Ms. Akari Noguchi, worked for public policy & corporate governance in Yahoo Japan

3.Mr. Cláudio S. de Lucena Neto, Visiting Researcher of Georgetown University, Professor of Law, Center for Legal Studies, Paraíba State University of Brazil

4.Dr. Yi Ma, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley; Fellow of IEEE and ACM.

          
Key Issues raised (1 sentence per issue):            

• How fast AI industry develops;
• Ethical issues should be considered ahead when we make AI policies;
• AI can help enterprises to develop more and take Yahoo Japan for example;
• The roles which non-profit institutions can play in terms of AI development;
• What are the suggestions for AI policy-making.

- If there were presentations during the session, please provide a 1-paragraph summary for each presentation:             

• Mr. Satish Babu gave words themed as Ethical aspects of AI Policy, such as whether robots should have rights like human beings do, including privacy; or how we should handle the unemployment issue when AI is applied. With no regard to ethical aspects of these, we may result in having AI and AS(artificial stupidity) at the same time.
• Ms. Akari Noguchi introduced how AI helped Yahoo Japan in shopping recommendation, behavior targeting by past behavior analysis and modeling in advertising, spam mail filtering, fostering security system to monitor and suspend the fake login, etc. Using AI to find new patterns of fraud by current Machine learning and deep learning would be their plan for 2018.
• Mr. Cláudio S. de Lucena Neto shared his thoughts on who (institutions that were currently involved in policy debate), what was in their agenda and how they were doing it, and what was yet to be done in terms of policy development. He also wrapped up with the challenges he found the most difficult to overcome and emphasized on the import role IEEE was taking.
• Dr. Yi Ma believed that AI policy challenges, divided into three aspects, were—policies should accommodate differences of markets and nations; policies should resolve concerns with security, safety and privacy; policies should encourage companies to do good for the society. Great progress had been made both in AI industry and technology, and many changes had taken place promoted by private companies like certain social media had applied Bytedance (a Chinese company powered by AI) program for finding missing people with good results. So policy-making needs to catch up.

- Please describe the Discussions that took place during the workshop session (3 paragraphs): 

• The discussions took place right after the presentations and about 5 participants shared their viewpoints or raise some questions for the speakers.
• The questions were answered ardently by not only the speakers but also the audience. While answering the former questions, new issues were brought up. The discussions came to an end pitifully because time was running out so many participants waited to share a few words with the speakers after the workshop.
•  Main issues discussed were how different groups like programmers and businessmen could  solve their differences quickly in order to march towards the same goal of developing AI; what were the similarities between AI and other computing science like software programming; how to deal the unemployment issue, etc.

- Please describe any Participant suggestions regarding the way forward/ potential next steps /key takeaways (3 paragraphs):    

• To master the challenges for AI development, we should pay attention to determining its responsibility, accountability and maturity as much as we can.
• There is no quick way to stimulate different stakeholders to devote to AI cause, and the most important thing remained ‘dialogue’, which means communication among any group involved. No one could manage achieving AI development by oneself.
• NGO institutions, international or domestic, possessed great potentials for uniting different stakeholders to develop AI, many of which had already done many great jobs.

-Gender Reporting

1.- Estimate the overall number of the participants present at the session:  150
2.- Estimate the overall number of women present at the session: 75
3.- To what extent did the session discuss gender equality and/or women’s empowerment? Very little
4. -If the session addressed issues related to gender equality and/or women’s empowerment, please provide a brief summary of the discussion:None